Amelia Meath & Blake Mills – “Neon Blue”Amelia Meath & Blake Mills – “Neon Blue”

Sylvan Esso have long been an installation in a small but vibrant scene in North Carolina, their studio serving as a hub for other artists in the area as well as their own work. Now, they’re building out from that. Today, the duo of Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn, alongside their manager Martin Anderson, have announced that they’ve started a new label called Psychic Hotline in partnership with Secretly Distribution. They’re kicking the whole thing off with a single series featuring contributions from Anjimile, Bartees Strange with Eric Slick and Ohmme, Flock Of Dimes, Made Of Oak, Mountain Man, Peach Fuzz, the Tallest Man On Earth, Uwade, and more.

The first single in the series is “Neon Blue,” a collaboration between Meath and Blake Mills. (A press release describes them as “two longtime mutual admirers.”) It’s a gentle, dusty song, Mills’ acoustic guitars underpinning a quiet, conversational melody from Meath. The song also comes with an alternate version, a reinterpretation from Sam Gendel. Check them out below.

A lot of that might not be obvious from “Disco,” the band’s current single. As young, voracious listeners and growing musicians, Geese’s focus has already shifted a couple times over. In recent years, they’ve become more infatuated with a new generation of guitar bands in the post-punk or art-rock vein, name-checking the likes of Black Midi and Squid. “It was mostly hearing those bands and how based within their instruments they were, how many new sounds they could eke out from that,” Bassin explains. “It was an inspiration.”

“At its best it’s music you really feel but there’s also all this guitar stuff your mind could chew on,” Winter adds.

Along the way, Geese have already released some music. There was an album in 2017, and an EP in 2019, all of which have been scrubbed from the internet to make way for the “official” era of Geese. One could imagine the growing pains and explorations that would’ve been evident there as the band’s tastes changed, but by the time they got to recording their proper debut all these disparate interests were cohering.

That album, Projector, is due out later this year and it’s a wiry, mesmerizing thing. Geese’s songs are packed with hooks both vocal and instrumental, but at the same time songs will rise and fall and combust, sputtering into dead ends or bursting into unexpected colors. The immaculately constructed “Disco” — a wildly ambitious lead single with various passages carefully arranged for a handful of cathartic payoffs — sits at the core of the album literally and spiritually. It captures the breadth of what Projector digs into, but also represents a sort of synthesis from which the other songs shoot off. Maybe some New York comparisons are inevitable: There’s a song called “Fantasies / Survival” that sounds like the Strokes before unspooling into a spastic guitar outro, and the interweaving guitars recall Television throughout. But at the same time Geese leaned into angularity and percussive melodies, they didn’t lose the psychedelia that first inspired them. Across the album there are frayed but also cascading, shimmering guitars, like Geese looked to recent guitar bands and old post-punk but filtered it through Radiohead. (In Rainbows is collectively cited as a massive influence on the band, though Green remarks they were thinking about the string arrangements more than the guitars. In Rainbows came out when the members of Geese were like, five years old — it’s almost undistinguishable from the other classic rock touchstones they draw upon.)

All of this music has a feverish quality to it, a young band full of ideas and figuring out how to position them just so but also when to let things run amok. The sound is assured, smart, and infectious. But it did also arise from somewhat feverish circumstances. “In terms of getting songs done, we had such a crazy time constraint,” Bassin explains. They’d go to school and then on Friday nights gather to record as long as they could, before they had to stop tracking drums at a certain point in the evening. He adds: “There was an urgency involved in recording.” All of it was driving towards that one simple goal, to finish this document of their late teens and put it out into the world before they moved on. There was a deadline in mind, the album came together, and a year and a half ago that’s as far as the plan extended.

When it comes to the thematic content of the album, Winter doesn’t go into a lot of details. “Looking back on it, the lyrics are a little angrier than anything I had done up until that point,” he offers. “I was focusing on making them more abstract than usual.” While he says many of them are short stories adopting a character, there’s still ways you could potentially read into Projector as a narrative glimpse of where Geese were in their lives, too. They admit there was probably some high school angst in the mix, but you can also catch certain young adulthood reckonings. In one song called “Exploding House,” Winter sings how “some are meant to leave the nest” and “this house is freezing cold these days” at the same time it’s “all I have left and I can feel it breaking apart.” At the time, he was purging childhood positions as he got ready to leave home, while at the same time feeling like he’d be toiling away on music for 10 years before realizing the pipe dream of anyone paying attention.

It happened a lot faster than that. When labels got a hold of the album, a lot came calling. Suddenly, the band found themselves in the disorienting position of, in the thick of the pandemic, being stuck at home dealing with Zoom classes at the same time they were taking meetings with Fat Possum and Sub Pop. “I just remember it being three in the morning pacing around the room on FaceTime [with the band] like, ‘What’s going on!?’” Winter recalls. “I would sit at school just playing my DS through history class like, ‘I’m outta here.’” Maybe, in that sense, the lockdown helped Geese out. At the same time everyone’s lives went into upheaval, Geese felt their near-term expectations blow and apart and rearrange. They eventually signed with Partisan — the same label that’s recently pivoted to young, feverishly beloved artists like IDLES and Fontaines, D.C. — and began devising an actual future for themselves.

What once could’ve ended an insular local band story now seems destined for one of the more out-of-nowhere anticipated debuts of 2021. In the meantime, Geese wrote a ton of new material — Green estimates they have close to 30 new songs in the works — and have been plotting tour dates for the fall and 2022. Green reflects on how committing to the band and, accordingly, most of the band members deferring school, was a big decision amongst the chaotic, uncertain times of quarantine in 2020. Now, they’re making music in a completely different context: not as if a concrete end destination is readily in sight, but to continue evolving.

From the roiling, mutating sounds of Projector, you can already imagine various new directions the band could further delve into. At least in the abstract, that seems to be the point of whatever comes next. They don’t want to get “pigeonholed,” nor make another album that is in the same exact stylistic territory of their debut. Now, there’s a whole different plan coming together — and it’s ambitious beyond Geese’s already strikingly impressive debut. “We’re going to be a pretty different band by the time the second album comes out,” Winter hints. “For the better.”

In addition to the new music, Sylvan Esso are also reissuing their debut album via Psychic Hotline. To celebrate the new label, the duo also put together a block party on 8/14 at the Carrboro, NC venue Cat’s Cradle, which you can get tickets for here.